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Bill Whittle: Ferguson and the Real Race War

Since the shooting of Michael Brown by a white policeman and the ensuing riots and looting in Ferguson, MO, Americans have been told, yet again, that there is an epidemic of crime against black people in this country. But is there really a race war, and if so, which side is actually waging it?

TRANSCRIPT:

RACE RIOTS IN FURGUSON

Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.

Before we get into the bigger picture – of which the ongoing rioting in Furguson, Missouri is merely a symptom – let’s just be crystal clear about something.

IF it turns out that a police officer shot Michael Brown as he was standing still, his hands in the air, as his defenders claim, then that police officer needs to be charged with murder, and he needs to go to jail for the rest of his life.

But that doesn’t seem like what happened at all. This story is still unfolding and new details are being revealed every day. I’m not going to speculate on how Michael Brown’s life actually came to an end. But I am going to talk about what happened before and after.

Michael Brown has been repeatedly referred to in the media as a “gentle giant,” and an “unarmed black teen.”

Here’s surveillance video of the gentle giant, taken a short time before the shooting, stealing a handful of cigars and then gently strong arming the store owner out of his way.

So why is it that the Attorney General, appointed by the President of the United States of America, put intense political pressure on the Ferguson Police Department to suppress this standard, ordinary surveillance video - a video, by the way, that caused the destruction of this man’s store and left him fearing for his life. Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Defenders of Michael Brown say that this is an attempt to criminalize him and therefore deflect attention from the police shooting. Really? That kind of casual violence, that sense of entitlement, that utter disrespect for the law or another human being – don’t take my word for it; the evidence is right there in front of your eyes – that attitude has nothing to do with the police claim that he was charging the officer when he was shot? This doesn’t shed some doubt on the story of a gentle, innocent, “unarmed black teen” assassinated by the police while his hands were in the air for the crime of being black?

Let’s cut to the chase here. Spokesmen for the protestors rioting in Ferguson and St. Louis – and, in fact, a large percentage of the general population -- claim that there is an epidemic of white on black crime, of white cops shooting unarmed black teens. Is that, in fact, happening?

According to the FBI, there were 408,217 robberies in 2009. That’s about 1100 a day, or in round numbers, about once a minute, 24 hours a day. That means a thousand times a day the police are called, a thousand times a day arrests are made and in general terms the events leading up to the shots being fired in Ferguson Missouri happen about one thousand times PER DAY.

So if there’s this epidemic of white policemen executing innocent black males, why do we only hear about a case like this every few years? And why do most of those cases – like this one – seem to end up with extenuating circumstances? And why do the few cases that don’t have extenuating circumstances end up with the offending officers in jail? If this is an epidemic – where’s the epidemic? 30,000 commercial flights land safely each day in America. They don’t make the news either.

So. Is there an epidemic of racial violence loose in America today?

There is.

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, in 2010, 62,593 blacks were the victims of white violence. During that same year, 320,082 whites were the victims of black violence. That’s five times as many violent attacks, but that number is misleading, since the black and white populations are not the same size. When 38 million black Americans commit five times as many violent crimes on 197 million whites as they receive, what you discover is that black perpetrators violently assault White victims TWENTY-FIVE times more frequently. When it comes to a specific kind of violent crime -- aggravated assault -- the number of black on white crimes is TWO HUNDRED TIMES HIGHER than white on black crimes. Oh, there’s an epidemic of racial violence in America, all right.

Reporter and author Colin Flaherty has taken a cold, clear-eyed view of the statistics that don’t make the news because they are suppressed by the news. He reports, for example -- again in 2010 -- the National Crime Victimization Survey reported approximately 13,000 black-on-white rapes and 39,000 black-on-white robberies – both violent crimes. The statistics show that the number of white on black rapes and violent robberies were so small that they had to be rounded to the nearest whole number, and that whole number was ZERO.

Critics will say that I am using these statistics to justify the murder of Michael Brown. But I said at the beginning – if Michael Brown were shot in cold blood then the police officer needs to pay the price for murder. This has nothing to do with Michael Brown. This has EVERYTHING to do with the narrative that the President, the Attorney General, and all of these race hustlers are trying to create using Michael Brown.

There is, in fact, a racial war of violence and hatred in America. Open racism is simply not tolerated in white America today, but black racism is the toxic glue that holds the progressive coalition together. Tolerance of – in fact, as we see from the events in Ferguson, open encouragement of black rage at a narrative that not only does not exist but reverses the daily outrages that do exist, is what defines modern progressivism. It is the politics of envy, anger, entitlement, lawlessness, violence and bald-faced lies.

And of all the promises broken by this man, surely none is more heartbreaking than the one promise that got him elected in the first place: the promise of a post-racial future. He and his racist progressive cohorts can never surrender the weapon that has gotten them everything, not the least of which is personal political power and trillions of dollars of redistributed wealth. And this latest outrage in Furguson is yet another example – as if another was needed among the economic wreckage, creeping totalitarianism, and foreign-policy disasters -- that he and his leftist cohorts would rather rule over ruins than disappear into the dustbin of a healthy and healed nation.